Leadership Lessons from Children’s Books

By Adam Grant

May 8, 2014

Being a leader is a complex task, but the defining moments of great leadership can be surprisingly simple. As a father of three kids under six, I’ve noticed some striking parallels between the morals of bedtime stories and the legacies of illustrious leaders.

If I were building a leadership library, I would stock it with these nine children’s books. Each captures a key decision of a favorite leader, and matches up with research evidence:

Archetype: Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, who were running a division of a film company when a new president asked them to submit a list of names for layoffs. They came back with a total of two names: their own. The president backed off, and a few months later Catmull and Smith started a little company called Pixar with Steve Jobs.

Archetype: Jeff Bezos. When he spots a typo in an Amazon memo, he sends it back to the author, stating that he found typos—but not revealing where. The author ends up finding some additional errors, and learns to be more careful in the future.

Archetype: Sallie Krawcheck. As the most powerful woman on Wall Street, she was fired from Smith Barney. She kept her head up, sought feedback on how she could have improved, and became the head of Merrill Lynch, Bank of America’s wealth management business.

Archetype: Martin Luther King Jr. “We cannot turn back,” he boomed, galvanizing the civil rights movement with his dream that “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Archetype: Thomas Watson Jr. According to legend, a vice president failed on a project that cost IBM about $10 million, and brought his resignation letter to Watson. Instead of firing him, Watson told him he couldn’t leave, because the company just paid $10 million for his education.